


Your Heart is a Muscle the Size of Your Fist

by rainbw



Category: Amulet (Graphic Novels)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Multi, Other, like all the characters are involved, not gonna specify any characters/relationships bc theres Too Many, read the notes i beg of u
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-05-30
Updated: 2016-05-29
Packaged: 2018-07-11 02:13:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,229
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7022368
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rainbw/pseuds/rainbw
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The Voice has tried again and again. Looks like it's time to do something desperate.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Your Heart is a Muscle the Size of Your Fist

**Author's Note:**

> ive been working on this fic since like. february so i think i have to say a few things before it gets read  
> FIRST OF ALL. M A S S I V E THANKS TO SCARLETISCOOL like literally without her i wouldnt have this thing published she helped me write it and reminded me to publish it check her out shes a Cool Bean  
> second of all. this is probably not the amulet fic ur gonna be looking for. to turn away any potential readers who wouldnt enjoy this, im gonna put these things out here:   
> \- theres no tremily to be found here, sorry!! they dont kiss  
> \- there are, however, stupid crackships bc those Fuel Me  
> \- this is prob gonna get kinda violent at times bc i am an Edgelord  
> \- no one is okay here im projecting myself on these characters left and right alright no ones mental health is Okay at all   
> \- there are gay ships because i am a Massive Gay  
> \- everyone is gay in general im sorry   
> \- a lot of things get changed i mean this is an au  
> \- there are Naughty Words watch out kiddos  
> if u havent turned away after all that, please enjoy ur bad Edge Fic

Another year, another home.   
Barely a month had passed before Emily’s mother was ferreting her away from the house, packing everything hurriedly into a bag while glancing over her shoulder. The dawn had barely broken before they were rushed into clothes and heaved everything into worn suitcases. Emily and her little brother, Navin, barely had enough time to grab their things before they were racing away, going far above the speed limit to a different house.   
“Why did we leave this time?” Navin asked, a petulant tone creeping into his voice. He peered over his shoulder, then at the speedometer, frowning. “The sign there said the speed limit is 65 miles an hour. We’re going about 100.”  
“No time,” her mother growled, clutching the steering wheel. “They might be behind us.”  
“Who?” Navin sounded worried. He reached over, clutching his sister’s hand.   
“No one, honey. Calm down.” Emily’s mother looked like she could use some reassuring herself; heavy bags hung under her eyes, and she gripped the steering wheel so hard her knuckles turned white.   
“Mother, who is it?” Emily did her best to sound calm and failed. Her voice shook ever so slightly, but that would be enough to tip everyone off. Her voice never shook, even though she was fifteen and her voice was supposed to crack and shake and wobble.   
“I’ll tell you later, sweetheart, but that house isn’t safe for us. Not anymore.” Her mother looked only slightly calmer as she glanced back for a moment, smiling faintly. Emily suddenly realized that this must be taxing for her; she had to deal with whoever was following them, and he had died in this car...  
No. Emily blinked hard, turning to stare out the window.   
They drove for hours, only stopping once when Emily’s mother deemed they were far enough away. They stepped outside, stopping at a tiny diner to eat lunch and freshen up, and walked out with snacks and a milkshake each. By that time, the initial shock had worn down, and everyone smiled and laughed; yet, her mother seemed so far away. Emily couldn't help but wonder what she could do to help, if she could do anything. But anything short of a miracle would likely be impossible.  
The sky had faded into sunset and their food into mere memories by the time Emily’s mother announced, “Nearly there.”   
Like that, Navin perked up. “OOOOH, we’re there?”  
“Not yet, sweetheart.” Emily’s mother tilted her head to smile at him, but this time she seemed less tired and old. She seemed happy, almost, although something still seemed missing. “We probably won’t stay there, anyway. I’ll point it out and you can look, but we’ll need a motel. This place was your great-grandfather’s, you know, and it’s very, very old and hasn’t been occupied for years.”  
In the end, they never even drove past it; they saw a motel, small and dilapidated but cheap, and parked to sleep there for the night. Her mother patted the place down for bedbugs, and Emily changed and fell asleep almost immediately, more tired than she’d ever been despite staying in the same place for a few hours. Vague images- some familiar, some otherworldly- haunted her dreams but were all but forgotten when she woke up to the sun rising and the realization that, yet again, she had left home.   
The day seemed to last so long, yet it was only a blur now. Emily frowned, wondering if everything would be like that, forever.   
Ah, well. She yawned, stretching. That, she reasoned, could wait. She had different issues now.   
Emily’s mother had set a broom and a mop and Clorox wipes in front of her bed, a note pinned to the side that flapped eagerly despite the absence of wind: "I’m downstairs with breakfast. Bring these. Wear some old/dirty clothes- we’re doing some serious cleaning work today. If Navin’s not up by the time you’re dressed, wake him. Love you ~Mom"  
Emily sighed, rummaging through her suitcase to find a single stained t-shirt and sweatpants a size too large. She carted them to the bathroom, splashing her face with cold water and pulling on the clothes.   
“Navin, wake up,” she called when she was dressed. She found an old bandanna to keep her hair out of her face with and tied it around her head as he sat up blearily, rubbing his eyes.   
“What now?” he complained with a yawn. “Don’t tell me- we have to leave because there’s killer robots or something.”  
“No. The only thing we’ll be facing today is a bunch of killer dust bunnies.” Emily smiled and pointed at the pile of cleaning supplies. “You need to get dressed. And make sure it’s old clothes, or one of your shitty Minecraft t-shirts.”  
“Hey!” Navin protested. He held one up to the light. “I happen to like those shirts, thanks ever so much. Also, language.”  
“I am fifteen. I hear much worse on a daily basis.” Emily jutted her chin up in the air haughtily.   
“Doesn’t mean I do,” Navin muttered, yawning and rubbing his eyes as he marched off to the bathroom.   
The two ate a quick breakfast, gulping down eggs and toast while their mother chattered about the house (“It’s old and dirty but very, very beautiful, you’ll love it, I swear!”) until they all trooped into the car, carrying supplies with them into the seats, and drove off.   
The mansion was beautiful, but it was clearly only a shadow of its former grandeur. The windows, all of them stained glass depicting events Emily couldn’t place, were cracked and smashed in. Cobwebs covered everything, and bugs and mice skittered under their feet. Dust coated the floor in a thick, filthy carpet. Where there weren’t actual bunnies, dust bunnies ran rampant.   
“Oh, yeah, this place is gonna need a lot of love,” Emily’s mother observed dryly. Her lips pursed as she stared at the chandelier, made of gold or silver, hanging above her. The candles were nothing but melted stubs, and cobwebs hung gracefully between the gaps, spiders skittering here and there, spreading their contagion across the house.   
“Where are we supposed to start?” Emily frowned at her cleaning supplies. She was pretty sure Clorox wipes wouldn’t help here.   
“We brought trash bags, right?” Emily’s mother was already digging through the tote bags. She pulled out several boxes of trash bags. “We sweep all the dust and stuff into here, then dispose of it later. Also, we mop. A lot.”   
Turns out that was harder than it sounded.   
Emily had never worked so hard in her life. She filled three bags full of dust and cobwebs by the end of the day, and vowed to explore later. She could see why she needed to wear old clothes; she was pretty sure all the dust would never come out of her clothes again. All of them took far too long in the shower getting the dust out of their tangled hair and from underneath their nails.  
She and Navin went to bed without dinner, their mother pulling out an air mattress to sleep on. The next day, they woke up at eight to find a plate of eggs and toast for both of them and their mother scratching something down in a journal.  
“Oh, you’re awake!” She yawned, stretching. “Took you long enough. I made breakfast. Eat fast; we have to clean the place up.”  
The rest of the week proceeded on a lot like this; get up, eat breakfast, clean the house, go to sleep, repeat. On Thursday, an exterminator came at around lunchtime, so Emily and Navin were free to wander the house while their mother led him around downstairs. They found an odd statue with the imprint of a hand that revealed a glowing amulet when Emily pressed her hand into it. It was a bit creepy, but it was cool, and it was likely just a pressure sensor or something. Emily decided not to worry about it. She put it on and the two spent a good three hours simply walking around the house, making a map and picking out their rooms. By the time they rose in the morning, Emily was in a much better mood, even if she couldn’t seem to take the necklace off and had incredibly weird dreams of burning pink fire when she fell asleep.   
The dawn the next day brought even better news: their mother had looked over the house and deemed it clean enough to move into.  
“Now, we just have general repairs,” she said with a yawn, stretching. “The water and electricity seemed good enough when I got it appraised, but it doesn’t hurt to check. Also, those sheets desperately need to be cleaned or replaced. We’ll be in sleeping bags for a while.”   
Emily’s mother spent the rest of the day walking around, taking the sheets off the beds (there were 27 in total, for some unfathomable reason) and taking them to the washer/dryers. She allowed Emily and Navin to wander around, so they did, making revisions to their maps and rummaging through drawers.   
“Oh, look at this!” Navin said in a hushed voice one day,pulling two scraps of paper out of a drawer. “Pictures!”  
Emily peered over his shoulder to look. Both pictures looked old and worn, a bit warped and faded around the edges, and both were clearly of Silas. One showed him with his arms around another man, shorter and stockier than him, smiling as the other kissed his cheek. A boy, about Navin’s age, stood in front of them, smiling and waving. Robots stood behind and next to him; a robotic bird on Silas’s shoulder, a gray robot with one hand on the child’s shoulder, a bronze robot looking like it was trying to hold back a smile. The other looked a bit newer, and the child and other person were gone. SIlas’s hair had grown longer, brushing his shoulders, and looked grayer. Robots crowded in on the picture, some looking a bit more worn, with seemingly thousands of new additions. Three stood out in particular; a pink bunny (sitting on Silas’s shoulders, grinning broadly); a yellowish robot (smiling awkwardly and waving); and the same bronze one (staring disapprovingly into the camera and definitely trying to hold back a smile). Emily gasped and took the pictures, handling them gently as though they would dissolve under her fingertips.   
“Wonder who he is.” Navin poked the image of the person standing next to Silas. “Mom never mentioned that Silas was gay.”  
Emily wrinkled her nose. “You never mentioned you were bi either.”  
Navin scoffed at her. "The same goes for you.”   
“Well, I wonder who those robots are. Are they posed, or did Silas actually program sentient robots?” She pointed to the robots. Their expressions all seemed genuine enough, and it would take a while to position the birds so close to the ceiling. Still... Emily had read a book about robots, and it said that it would probably take centuries to produce an actually sentient robot. If Silas had produced them, there would be fanfare. His name would be in the books. So, why wasn’t it?   
“Bet they were sentient. They look real enough,” Navin said. “Besides, there were thousands of prototypes and journals of programming out there. All that effort’s got to yield something.”   
“Not all the time. Look at Mom; she tries really hard, and we end up here.”   
“Here isn’t so bad, I think! I mean, there’s a ton of robots, we don’t start school for another month...” Navin grinned at her. “Besides, there’s so much cool stuff here, I couldn’t hate this place if I tried.”  
“At least that makes one of us,” Emily muttered, frowning at the picture. It didn’t clear anything up about this place, why they were here, who their grandfather was, anything; it only made things more confusing.  
Emily hated being confused.   
But it was sweet, either way. She tucked both pictures into her jeans pocket.  
“Don’t be a downer. C’mon, let’s go to the attic. That place was cool, and it had, like, a massive closet we never even looked in.” Navin took her hand, pulling her towards a staircase, and Emily had no choice but to follow.   
Night fell, and Emily’s mother regrouped with them in a supply closet. There, they sat on sleeping bags eating ramen and discussing where the rooms would be. Emily and Navin showed off their map and the miscellaneous items from the drawers they had shoved in their pocket, and their mother smiled and praised them on their findings. The mood felt lighter than it had in weeks, and no one wanted to spoil it by talking about the day they left.   
Finally, they turned off the lanterns and slept.   
~*~  
Darkness, darkness, darkness.   
Emily couldn’t see anything. She was sure her eyes were open, and yet sure they weren’t. She was dreaming, but it seemed so real.   
She willed the darkness to lift. Nothing happened.   
So she sat in silence until, slowly, it lifted onto a scene of chaos.   
She was in some sort of airship. She didn’t know how she knew this, but she... did, somehow. Two people stood at the edge of the ship, their hair flowing behind them. Blasts of light shot out of something on their chests at a firey phoenix that looked oddly familiar. At the controls stood someone that looked suspiciously like Navin, but somehow younger and older at once; he had chubby cheeks and wide eyes, but he looked exhausted and his hands looked blistered and weathered and old. People raced around, some brandishing weapons, some not. She spotted a gray cat person (literally a cat person, like, a person with cat ears and a tail covered in cat fur) run out to the edge of the ship and throw knives at the phoenix, who didn’t seem affected.   
“What the hell is that?” A fox person wielding a sword raced to the prow. “Is that Emily?”  
“Not any longer,” one of the people at the port hissed. He looked over his shoulder, and Emily suddenly realized that he was not human. His eyes looked almost cat-like, his skin grayish, his teeth sharp and serrated like a shark’s. Despite this, she recognized real fear in his eyes. “Emily is gone.”  
Gasps rang through the ship. A woman that looked like Emily’s mother, yet more fragile somehow, started sobbing. Not-Navin blinked tears away and focused on the controls.   
The phoenix hissed a bolt of flame upwards. A panel started blinking and beeping loudly.   
“That’s the balloon.” A different cat, much pudgier and grasping a pipe tightly in his hand, leaned over the controls. “We’re going down in flames.”  
And just like that, everything stopped.   
The people held perfectly still, like statues. The phoenix’s flames stopped leaping and jumping. The tears on Not-Navin and Not-Emily’s-Mother’s face stopped moving. Emily stepped forwards and nothing moved under her feet; nothing creaked, nothing reacted at all. The very air felt stale and still.   
“What comes next is awfully brutal. Trust me, you don’t want to see it,” someone remarked behind her. Emily spun around, searching for the source of the voice.   
“Over here,” the voice called, slightly to her left, and as she spun around the world melted away into a sunny courtyard.   
“I thought this looked nicer,” the creature in front of her said.   
Emily yelped and leapt back. The creature... its form seemed to seep into the horizon like dye in water. It looked only vaguely humanoid, with spindly limbs and a narrow chest and a huge head with a crest on the back that looked almost like a crown. Bright light curled itself in a spiral on the creature’s face; Emily looked down and realized it was the same design as the one on her stone.   
“What was that?” she asked, trying to keep her voice from trembling.   
“The future,” the creature said simply. “Or, it might be. It was, but that is neither here nor there.”  
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Emily sounded petulant and she knew it, but she also discovered that she couldn’t really be brought to care.   
“It means that all that you saw was in an alternate dimension.”  
Emily blinked. “That... really doesn’t clear it up.”  
The creature sighed. “You’ve heard of the multiverse theory, am I correct?”  
“Well, yeah.” They had a science unit on it once, in some school only a little better than the rest. She still remembered the science teacher, a petite woman with bright pink hair and wide green eyes framed by glasses, standing at the board and rambling on about bubbles and string.   
“Think of it like that. Several small changes caused a ripple effect that caused many things to change. For instance, in this universe, your mother is stronger and much more resilient, as is a friend of yours named Miskit whom you’ll meet later.” The symbol on the creature’s face glowed slightly, and Emily wondered if it changed with its emotions. “That universe was a failure on my part. I will not let the same happen with this universe.”  
“And how can I trust you?” Emily suddenly remembered all the schoolyard bullies that had tormented Navin, taking advantage of his good nature, and clenched her fists in preparation for a fight.  
“Do you see the stone around your neck?”  
“Well, no duh. I can’t take it off.”  
“There’s a reason for that.” The insignia on the creature’s head flashed brightly. “Once you put on a stone, you cannot take it off unless it is destroyed. I’m afraid you’ll have to trust me.”   
“Well, this is brilliant,” Emily sighed, putting her head in her hands. “I suppose I can’t just... take a hammer to it or something?”  
“The stone will not break by normal methods,” the creature hissed, sounding almost offended.   
“Fine. Then, assuming I trust you to tell the truth, what happened next? How can I avoid it?” Emily wasn’t sure she wanted to hear the response, and the creature clearly didn’t want to spill it.   
After nearly a minute of silence, the creature said, very slowly, “The ship plummeted and broke. Everyone inside died. You- the phoenix- took a sword from the fox and took your life.”   
Emily stared into the distance, trying to digest all that. “And this isn’t what was supposed to happen, I assume.”  
“No. I admit that I had... ulterior motives in that universe, but I intend on starting fresh this time.” The creature seemed to smile at her. “I assure you, I am trustworthy.”  
Emily straightened her back. “Then prove it.”  
“Fine.” The creature seemed to straighten up, too, and suddenly started talking: “You will wake up soon due to something in the basement. It is a creature called an arachnipod. Your mother will be taken by it. You must follow it, but do not let Navin be taken. You do not require anything but the clothes on your back and your amulet. I will guide you to the place where you will be safest. Listen closely. And for the love of the stars, don’t let Miskit take the wrong bullets.”   
Emily stared, trying to digest this as the world faded away around her. In the few seconds before she woke up, she could've sworn she saw that creature waving.

**Author's Note:**

> w ow okay this is Long   
> i dont rly?? have a publishing schedule in mind?? sorry to the 1 person who enjoyed this lmao


End file.
